Nobody Said It Would Be This Hard
by pumpkinnox20
Summary: It's the day after The Battle of Hogwarts and Harry's coping with guilt. He's a survivor, but so many are lost. She was so quiet. Far cry from the usual. Her arrival had usually been proclaimed by a fanfare, brass music orchestra playing hard the tones that meant her name. But now it had sounded more like a sad violin, perhaps not even that. Even the world was tired.


It was a calm after the storm. Grounds have gone quiet, twining themselves in a misty cloak of a new day. A lot of people put hope in that day, and it came bright and sunny. Sunny, without a cloud in the sky, as if the grounds and castle of Hogwarts hadn't lived to see the carnage last night, blood of the fallen warriors still glistening in the sun. But the silence stifled everything, as it has tendency to. Harry didn't know whether that was a solemn silence, like the one after Dumbledore died, paying respects for those who have gone, or it was simply one of the tired ones. People cried too much and fretted too much. Even the children grow silent after crying, merely sobbing. And that was, he presumed, what has happening within the walls.

Summoning the memory of Ginny's face, leaning against Mrs Weasley, Harry felt utterly disgusted by himself. He loved her, God knows, he could swear by it. Months without her filled him with solitude he had never foreseen. And he was an orphan, alone in the whole world. But her... He couldn't form a sensible sentence, and the only word that ever came to his mind was: Fantastic. But he knew very well that it had been doomed to fail. She had lost a brother because of him, because of that endless fighting that was cast upon him when he was merely one year old. He was but a child and Voldemort had marked him as an equal. But he had been carrying that weight upon his shoulders for the last six years, and he carried it with a mix of bitterness, suffering and mad courage that wouldn't let him quit, even when everything seemed to be against him.

But now, in all that silence, on a bench in the park, admiring the Black Lake as it bathed in the sunlight and smoke that flickered from Hagrid's chimney, he wanted to quit. Just know, when he knew that the fighting is over, when all is said and done. He did what he had pledged to do. He knew very well that it wasn't going to be easy, but no one said it's going to be that hard. No one said people he loved them most would die because of him, people someone else loved more than the world itself. He wasn't ready for such sacrifices. He chuckled, caught up in an unrealistic thought he knew to be true - he would be prepared to die, not blinking an eye, he'd sacrifice himself, there was so little left, really, but the thought of Tonks', Fred's, Lupin's, and even Lavender's, who was painfully irritating but kind - true Gryffindor till the very end, death, that hurt more than a thousand simultaneously inflicted Cruciatus curses. It tore him inside, but it tore him with all the strength of stars collapsing.

He wanted to apologise to everyone, even though he had known that an apology means nothing. He wanted to apologise and he wanted to quit, passionately and wildly, all of a sudden too tired for it all. Too worn out for the rest of the life he didn't know how to live. He had lived in fright too long, fough too long and didn't have the faintest idea how to start again - how to go to school next autumn, play Quidditch and love Ginny. His heart was dented, and his soul tired. He was only seventeen.

And it seemed like it had only been yesterday that he had layed in the summer sun, after Ginny's finals, her red hair falling all over his lap, her scribbling on a parchment and wildly resisting his attempts to see what she had been doing. She even threatened to curse him with a Bat-Bogey-Hex. Those were the happy days. His hand over her waist, The Daily Prophet casually cast aside while Ron and Hermione bickered again over a meaningless little thing. Perfect smell of strawberries in the air, her hair radiated it, and bliss. Perfect bliss in the middle of all the hell, all the agony. They had stolen a couple of blissful moments and Harry had then, sitting estranged from everyone else and soaking up the beggining of a new day - new era, realized that would be quite enough for all eternity.

One of the three persons he loved the most, the only person he had truly fallen in love with - for the right reasons, in the right way, although realizing that too late, lost her brother and her friends in one night. He had never wondered whether that weary smile she had cast in his direction that dawn, sitting by her family that had been mourning Fred, was really a facade. She must've been furious, must've wanted to kill him with her own wand and take her revenge for everything he'd made her endure. After grief comes the rage, or was it the other way around? Harry didn't know anymore. But if she had struck him that instant, he wouldn't have fought back. He deserved it. She was far too honorable, as were the ones who had lost the people they loved or themselves, for such ache. Good people had their limits, drawn out hard, but you couldn't transcend it and live to see the next day. He believed that, in the best case scenario, she would never want to see him again.

But fate had different plans.

She was so quiet. Far cry from the usual. Her arrival had usually been proclaimed by a fanfare, brass music orchestra playing hard the tones that meant her name. But now it had sounded more like a sad violin, perhaps not even that. The silence was far too vast for it to mean anything. Even the world was tired.

She didn't look at him, poking around at a wound in her palm, stabbing it as though she felt no glimpse of pain. Her clothes were ripped, face smeared with soot and ashes, balls of dust on her eyelashes and hair half- burnt. He leaned over subtly, just enough to notice the scar that had taken the length of her left cheek, a scar that she would carry with pride through the years, as he had done with the scar-shaped one on his forehead. Ginny was like that. Scars weren't a nuisance as most people would think. She wore them with pride, allowing them to show everyone what she'd been through, what she'd done to earn them.

"Fred is dead."

Her voice sounded eerie, calm, but cracked, coarse from screaming and weeping. Has anyone ever said that you don't feel really dignified after fighting?

She raised her head and peered right into his eyes, and her face twisted into a crooked smile that had meant everything but joy. A corner of her lip was raised high into her cheek, and the other one was settled where it had been. It wasn't a smile he had usually seen with her. Her smiles were happy, bursting with pride, joyful, even spiteful a bit. But this was bitterness and anguish, one of those emotions that make a grown man cave into a foetal position and cling on to his soul, stop her from getting away in all its raggedness.

"You know what's silly? I can't even realize that. I can't even realize that Fred is dead. I am saying it right now, dead, and I could keep on saying it for the next few hours. Dead. Dead. Dead. No, it just isn't getting to my head", she kept shaking her head and shrugging her shoulders, somewhat confused, overly bewildered.

"Do you think it's something that happens?"

"Ginny, I-"

"You don't know what to say?"

It was his turn to look down. He had softly returned his glasses to the root of his nose, a splot of blood in the right corner. His clothes drenched in enough to feed a whole vampire group. He noticed such odd things when he refused to notice the important ones.

"It's all right. I didn't expect you to know."

"I'm sorry."

The words rolled over his tongue with the weight of the giant squid that had all the time in the world. He hasn't said that to anyone just yet and finally, he realized why. It was too hard.

"I know, Harry. But I will not console you. I am far too mad."

"I understand."

She had flinched like charred and observed him as though he was a particularly odd plant. He wasn't sure whether he should run for cover or everything would be fine.

"I am not mad with you! You are so selfish. Do you think any of them died for you? Do you think any of them even though about you? They fought for their families, their loves, for a brighter future. It's selfish of you to sit here and blame yourself when you weren't the one that had placed them in front of a firing squad and commanded to fire away. Voldemort is to blame."

She had been mad and he did see it in her eyes. Under what seemed to be centuries old exhaustion that took over everything else, he saw the fury and he saw the anger. He saw all the sleepless night she would have to live through trying to survive the next few months. It will get easier with time, everything did. But the nightmares stay.

And she was right. He didn't find it hard to admit that, not after everything. It was loathsome of him to sit there instead of saluting the fallen, as though he didn't care, as though those people weren't his friends as well. After all, he was afraid that he'd become a coward.

"Harry, your place isn't here. You should be with us in the Great Hall. Saluting the fallen, celebrating the new beginning. Before the sorrow kicks in again, before all of that..."

She uttered the words, gradually becoming quieter and quieter, until her voice finally reached whisper and her head lowered to her chest, taking in the air she had probably thought she would never take in again. Each breath had the significance of the drowner's one. And it felt like lead.

Wordlessly, he found her hand and put his palm over. She hadn't even flinched when the coarse palm of his hand touched the wound on hers. She didn't even raise up her head.

"I'm not mad with you, but-" she had taken a deep breath and closed her eyes, turning her head towards him. When she has spoken again, her eyes bored into his, as if begging - " I need you. We all need you."

He had been afraid and he didn't know, barely aware of anything anymore. He wasn't even aware of his craving for death, this time final, and he wasn't afraid she'd kill him. Death... He'd seen what was on the other side, at least moderately. It will greet him one day, and he would young or old - he didn't know. But Ginny was there and she was the only fixed point. She was there, flesh and blood, her body bent under the weight too heavy for a giant, much less someone who is barely sixteen, her eyes that demanded a completely feasible thing (but he was so weak), her lips - chapped, her bruised face and arms, yet another scar that connected her clavicle with her neck, all the memories, everything so awake and alive, so real. He didn't cup her face with his hands because he needed her, his need was desperate and she was the only thing that could ever give him hope right now. His hands found her waist, the small of her back and he pressed her hard against himself, his lips to hers, the taste of saliva and blood and love and suffering and absolutely everything that had been and completely everything that will never be.

The taste of her on his lips was too much, maybe just a cause for everything that had bubbled up within him, and the tears appeared under his tightly shut eyelids, dropping onto the wooden bench under them. He didn't let go, he wasn't going to let go ever again. But she moved away, pressed her warm palms against his cheeks and smiled. Just once. Wide and bright, as if nothing had happened, as if everything was good and Fred would jump behind the first wall, throwing around ideas for yet another Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes product.

"I know you're daft and I know you probably thought I'd hated you, but I don't. The worst of all is that I can't hate you and this is all so horrible, but love is the only thing we have left, if not for us - for all of them. We owe them."

"I don't want you to go, Ginny. I thought you'd perhaps kill me, but I don't want you to go right now. Please."

She promptly nodded her head and drew him closer. And she truly never left.


End file.
